Well, after two weeks the headcold has finally packed up its dream-tangle bag and headed back into the tree line.I feel better. Yule is almost upon us. I actually enjoy the december build up, it's the festival itself that can feel a bit of a stretch. The girls have left early for frosty Norfolk, leaving this old bear to work on some literary loose ends and examine some quiet bits of his soul that he hasn't seen for a month or two. Cats for company,great meat from Rodney Cleave butchers, the occasional glass of Shiraz,words to write-it's a good scene.
So no great pearls of wisdom this week,just a wishing of the very best to us all in this time. May all our loneliness wander down to the shed, pull up a chair and drink whisky and play cards with all the lonely bits of other people.May that shed have a wood burning stove, plenty of books, a persian rug and an Irish fiddle player.
Which reminds me: Have you ever heard of Pecker Dunne? Check youtube for footage of this great hunk of Irish Gypsy playing songs of the travelling people.
Just one mythic image to play with. In the not too distant future i will be writing a book with my compadre and fellow mythteller Daniel Deardorff; a large thread to that book is the story 'Ivan and the Grey Wolf'and our accompaning commentary. In it Ivan has to stop riding a Horse and start riding a WOLF-in fact the Wolf kills the Horse. The Horse (in this story) is a image of collected wisdom, caution and preservation; the Wolf offers a thrilling,intelligent, troublesome ride- not offering normal ideas of safety.
What is it like to ride the back of a wolf? Do you remember when your Horse had to die for something new to enter? Let me know.
It feels like wolfish times we're living in-much uncertainty, travelling at speed, never quite sure if the energy we ride isn't going to gobble us up.There are big wolf marks in the economy, but also tremendous possibility-which is partly what the Grey Wolf brings.He also brings a kind of trickster-hope, which is a wild notion.
I'm greatly looking forward to the COYOTE MAN AND THE FOX WOMEN gathering in January,
(see www.schoolofmyth.com)and trips to Switzerland and Germany in the new year.For any locals there will be a Steiner Storytelling Festival in Devon last weekend in January that i'll be teaching and telling at.Plenty of U. S. work in the pipeline for spring and summer.I'll be making good trouble with all the american mytho-poets many of you met in the summer, and making new friends.
My Book, A Branch From The Lightning Tree: Wilderness, Myth and the Life Not yet Lived,is practically finished (i thought it was a year ago!). If we can't get a publishing deal sorted by Spring we will do a limited run via the School Press.
More speculation in a week or so,i want to leave with something by Thomas R. Smith, one of our very finest praise Poets-something of a lost art- a very old one.
TRUST
It's like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes
So you take your car to the new mechanic
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
The package left with a disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers-
all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn't.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even when
frozen, arrives at the right place.
And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can't read the address.
Take care in the frost, walking the lanes and under the blue black night.
Wishing that the storytellers fire stays close this christmas, that you eat loads, carouse,make a bloody fool of yourself and write nimble words to the Moon.
M x
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